When Charles Mingus, composer, arranger, bandleader and bass player, died on January 5th, 1979 of Lou Gehrig's disease, his legend already loomed so large it threatened to overwhelm his music. A passionate, turbulent, multi-faceted bear of a man who berated his audiences, berated his band and berated apartheid America, today he remains a largely misunderstood figure whose accomplishments are too big to ignore yet forbiddingly complex to contemplate.
"Charles had his share of trouble and anguish, his problems overcoming obstacles, but he was a man of enormous courage and honesty," says his wife, Sue Graham Mingus. "Despite the ups and downs, he always considered himself lucky to write the music he wanted and perform it. He was a man of enormous courage and honesty who knew he was a musician when the rest of the world did not. The upshot is this incredible legacy of music that he left behind."
A virtuoso bassist, Mingus was also a manipulator of ensemble textures with an acute ear for the blues. His melodies were so personal and his use of rhythm and harmony so dramatic in achieving his compositional goals that his music constituted an idiom. An unpredictable man: his wife says all he ever wanted was to be loved, yet he once famously assaulted his trombonist, a close friend, removing a front tooth in a flash of rage.
Such volatility gave rise to the 18-part Epitaph, his longest work, which was performed in part only once during his lifetime, disastrously, at New York's Town Hall in October 1962. Marred by inadequate preparation, the occasion was so traumatic Mingus never spoke about it again. After his death, researcher Andrew Homzy discovered the frayed, unfinished manuscript which was handed to musicologist and conductor Gunther Schuller to reconstruct.
When Epitaph was finally premiered under Schuller's baton at Alice Tully Hall in New York in 1989, it was the first time Sue Mingus had heard her late husband's work played by a large ensemble.
"It was such an experience; it shows a unique side of Charles," she says. "It was his masterwork, yet it shows his personality very clearly. Through it, I realised his music deserved to be heard in this way, with its dense harmonies and complex structures, so as an experiment we decided to organise a big band."
On the basis of a one-month contract, her 14-piece ensemble debuted in New York's Time Cafe at 380 Lafayette Street, just around the corner from Tower Records on Broadway. "My contract was from September 5th to October 5th 1991 and we're still there!" she smiles. "It was a relatively new club back then, they had a restaurant upstairs, a pastry shop, a sheik bar called The Fez, and a basement nightclub they hadn't figured out what to do with. We took the Thursday night in the basement, we had nothing to lose and neither did they."
The original band, like every subsequent edition, was stocked full of New York's finest jazz musicians. "We were lucky, because The New York Times got to hear about us and they did a piece encouraging their readers to hurry down because they said it wouldn't last. That piece certainly helped us and put us on the map."
While the band has had several musical directors, the real director is Sue Mingus herself. "I'm there to encourage and incite and also choose musicians and commission arrangements," she explains. "I'm very involved with the band. I choose the musicians each week, who's going to conduct and direct and encourage certain pieces so there is a balance between blues, swinging pieces, the more difficult works Charles has written, and his better-known stuff."
She remains convinced the band should not slavishly copy Mingus recordings, but honour the creative spirit Mingus fostered. "There were so many sides to Charles. I try and change the conductors and music directors because each musician has his own personality," she says. "One musician might favour his own arrangements, another will want to play his favourite Mingus composition every night, so I'll ask someone to do the first set, someone to do the second set, to keep an edginess and unpredictability because that's what Charles sought, this element of unexpectedness which to me is what jazz is all about."
This approach, in honouring the letter rather than the law of Mingus's music, has earned the band four successive Best Big Band awards in the annual Critics Poll of the influential American jazz magazine Downbeat.
"Charles's music is coming into its own in a way that was not understood in his lifetime," she observes. "In the beginning people thought it was impossible to have a Mingus band without Mingus, but I simply took my cue from Charles because he always considered himself first and foremost a composer."
Although she knew little about jazz before she married her husband, she had played classical piano and studied composition. A former publisher of an underground newspaper, she met Mingus in 1964. Their on-off relationship somehow survived the ups and downs of her husband's often melancholy life, and she was there at the end when he journeyed to Mexico in search of a cure from a mystic, where he died, aged 56.
During his lifetime, Mingus's tempestuous personality seemed crammed to bursting with an incredible range of emotions that somehow found voice within the swirling textures of his compositions. Yet he made clear in his autobiography Beneath the Underdog (Payback Press) that the fervour of his music was proportionate to the traumatic sources that inspired it - countless incidents of racial discrimination, the equivocal position of a black artist working in a white entertainment infrastructure, his eviction from his apartment, his nervous breakdown followed by a gradual return to work and finally a debilitating illness just as the greatness of his talent began to be recognised.
"At the beginning of the 21st century, Mingus's music is still speaking out, his uncompromising concern with justice and freedom of expression is as timely as any voice today," Sue Mingus reflects. Indeed, there is a telling contemporary relevance to Mingus's compositions that forces us to consider, in their sheer ambition, Mingus the composer. No longer does his music appear to be shaped by the rage of the underdog; instead, it stands out as an acerbic commentary on America's optimistic self-image of itself.
The Mingus Big Band will play Vicar Street, Dublin on Wednesday, March 29th, as part of the ESB Jazz Series.